The Human Disease Network is one of the BarabásiLab’s most reproduced images. Originally printed by the National Academies of Sciences as a poster to accompany the publication of a research paper on how diseases connect, it was subsequently reproduced by the New York Times and included in the Mapping It Out: Atlas of Contemporary Cartographies exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London.
The project took form after the publication of the Human Genome Project in 2001, when it seemed like another gene was linked to another disease on a weekly basis. While on sabbatical at Harvard Medical School’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute during the 2005–2006 academic year, Barabási found himself wondering what these many independent discoveries said about the relationships between diseases. The answer, he discovered, was a network in which two human diseases are connected through the genes implicated in both diseases.
It took six months for many drafts to arrive at The Human Disease Network, which shows each node as a different disease. The size of the node reflects the number of genes responsible for the disease. Node color denotes the class to which each disease belongs. Cancers, for example, are blue nodes, as distinct from neurological diseases in red. The links correspond to the genes that connect the two diseases. The extreme node-size variation in this image represents a significant departure from previous visualizations. By enhancing the visibility of the largest hubs, the range of hub size allows the most explored diseases to dominate the visual space.
The visualization of this network further evolved in 2018, when 3D color printing became accessible. It took many shattered prototypes to arrive at a viable data sculpture. But because of its spatial composition, the final 3D color version unveils certain relationships between disease classes that were largely hidden in the 2D map.
Eager to elevate the disease network into the physical space, during the 2020 pandemic Barabási collected pebbles on a beach in Boston, carefully matching their size and weight to the number of genes associated with each disease on the human disease map. He then spray-printed each pebble to match the disease class it belongs to. The wall shows the prints capturing the shadows of the rocks corresponding to each disease class. The mix of bright colors offers a strong contrast to the exceptional suffering these diseases cause.
BARABÁSILAB: HIDDEN PATTERNS
